Canterbury Earthquake - James Ball
Audio, Radio New Zealand
Some Christchurch residents were able to get out of the city to stay with relatives.
Some Christchurch residents were able to get out of the city to stay with relatives.
The plight of Earthquake victims in Christchurch has struck a chord with the pupils at an Auckland school. More than 300 pupils at Pasadena Intermediate, in the suburb of Point Chevalier, have donned the Canterbury colours, raising money to help a school down South recover from the disaster.
Two taxi drivers have spoken out for the first time about their brush with death when they narrowly escaped falling rubble during the Canterbury Earthquake.
Christchurch residents who've finally been allowed in to the earthquake ravaged inner-city redzone say the devastation was far worse than they had ever imagined.
After a shaky few weeks in Canterbury thousands of earthquake survivors have been rocked again, this time by heavy metal greats, Metallica.
In Canterbury, those carrying out sentences of community service are being put to good use - with teams of workers out helping with the post-earthquake clean-up.
Shell shocked residents still picking up the pieces in one of the worst earthquake affected parts of Canterbury, say a looming rates rise to pay for repairs will cripple them.
Canterbury has been hit by a large aftershock, a month to the day since a seven point one magnitude earthquake rocked the region.
Some Canterbury business owners say their employee's jobs are still in serious jeopardy, despite the Government extending its wage subsidy for another month.
The Insurance Council says it can give Cantabrians a guarantee that insurers will go as fast as they can to settle earthquake-related claims.
With Kelvin Berryman - Natural Hazards manager at GNS and Carol Ball - Red Cross Area Manager for Canterbury.
For six weeks after the February 2011 Christchurch earthquake millions of litres of raw sewage - along with lots of liquefaction - poured into the Avon and Heathcote Rivers. A team of biologists quickly got to work to measure the impact of this catastrophe on life in the Heathcote River and as they tell Alison Ballance, they were surprised by what they recorded over the next few months.
For many years the Heathcote-Avon estuary was the dumping ground for Christchurch's sewage. Then, in 2010, the wastewater was diverted well out to sea, via a long pipe. David Schiel from the University of Canterbury and John Zeldis from NIWA were investigating the effects of this diversion on the health of estuary when the 2011 Christchurch earthquakes happened, re-engineering both the estuary and their experiments.
Scientists are just beginning to understand why the recent Canterbury earthquakes 'punched above their size', and their findings could change international scientific thinking about earthquakes. Alison Ballance talks with GNS seismologists Martin Reyners and Bill Fry to find out more.